


we drink the blood (like lemonade)

by monsterbate



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Coping, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hawkeye's relationship with food, War, brief descriptions of injuries, just a lot of thinking about stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:20:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27318388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monsterbate/pseuds/monsterbate
Summary: He has been in Korea for three weeks and three days the first time his coffee tastes like blood. In those three weeks and three days, he has removed shrapnel from fourteen livers; he has had to remove three feet (two lefts, and a right); he has removed a staggering amount of colon; he has washed blood and feces and brain matter from his hands an obscene amount of times.It’s been 24 days.(Hawkeye Pierce, coping.)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 35





	we drink the blood (like lemonade)

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Morcheeba's [Blood Like Lemonade](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v-6aKHXlls).
> 
> The mistakes and miscastings are my own.

He has been in Korea for three weeks and three days the first time his coffee tastes like blood. In those three weeks and three days, he has removed shrapnel from fourteen livers; he has had to remove three feet (two lefts, and a right); he has removed a staggering amount of colon; he has washed blood and feces and brain matter from his hands an obscene amount of times. 

It’s been 24 days. _Just_ 24 days. _Only_ 24 days. 

He feels hollow and vibrating, like a rung bell. Constantly buzzing close to the skin, down under the military clothing and the layer of Korean dust and the chapped skin and the sour flavor of his hangover. 

Somehow, his world has unwound and been reknit and then unraveled again in only 24 days.

So when he sits down in the mess tent after another round in OR and lifts the greasy mug of coffee to lips and tastes only blood— 

Listen, Hawkeye knows a goddamned metaphor when it’s slapping him in the face and this? Is a goddamned metaphor for _something_. Which is the only reason he can think of for not fearing for his own shell-shocked sanity. There’s blood everywhere else, isn’t there? A little bit more in his coffee isn’t exactly surprising. It’s probably a goddamned rite of passage or something. 

Trapper just shrugs when Hawkeye mentions it later, lifting a shoulder to his ear as he drains his martini glass. “Why d’you think I drink so much? Everything else tastes like dirt or gunpowder. Blood was only a matter of time.”

::

“These eggs seem extra bad to anyone else today?” Henry asks, pushing the wet mass around on his tray. After six weeks, Hawkeye’s lost count of the colons and the livers and the misplaced feet and the shrapnel and the blood and the numbness. A man died under his hands.

“They do seem slightly more...tortured than usual,” Father Mulcahy says, examining a pallid forkful. 

“Probably the cook’s feeling guilty about something,” Trapper offers from behind his coffee cup, winking generally down the table. 

“Sounds like your kind of job,” Hawkeye says to the Father. “Hear confessional, feed the hungry—you know the old softshoe routine.”

Father Mulcahy wipes his mouth. “Ah, a ‘two birds, one stone’ kind of thing?” There’s a wryness to his response that Hawk’s only beginning to appreciate in the 4077’s chaplain. 

“They smell kinda like hellfire, don’t they?” Trapper asks. 

“Absolutely. Sulphur and brimstone. Angels would weep. Speaking of: won’t you join us, Major?” Hawkeye’s attention is on Major Houlihan, who’s leading Major Burns through the mess tent. 

She looks like she’s going to refuse until she spies Henry at the table— _That’s Colonel Blake to you_ , she snaps every time Hawkeye refers to their CO as Henry—and the speed at which her expression changes would be hilarious if not for the mirrored boot-licking pleasure on Frank’s face. Henry’s basically asleep on his pancakes so he doesn’t even notice. Lucky him.

“Oh, _Colonel_ Blake, how wonderful to see you this morning. Major Burns and I were just discussing our thoughts on the general organization of the OR, weren’t we Major?”

“Good morning, Majors,” the Father says into the ensuing silence. "I trust you slept well?"

Margaret swells up like an offended balloon about to burst but Henry’s head thumps on the table when it falls off his hand and interrupts her. “Oh, hey there kiddos. What’s the poop?”

::

Three months. Immeasurable shrapnel. Uncountable amputations. Unboundable blood. There is dirt and filth everywhere: in his boots, in his clothes, in his sheets, in the food, in the OR. He’s let four lives slip through his gloves. Maybe there’s tears, mixed in with the blood.

Maybe the coffee hasn't changed. Maybe it’s Hawkeye who’s—

This _place_ , this “new normal” they’ve shoved down his throat and ordered him to swallow is just— 

He hates it. He hates the entire human condition that brought him, some idiot American doctor, to a war-ravaged nation only to be asked to keep the wheels of suffering turning. He hates it so much that he’s fairly certain he’s going to end up hating himself at the end of it all. 

He gets another cup of coffee. 

::

“Mind if I join you?” Hawkeye asks, balancing his tray in one hand. Four months. Seven lives. There’s a sliver of blood under his thumbnail that he can’t get out, no matter how much he washes or digs or drinks.

Radar looks up from his overflowing tray and waves a hand. “Oh, gee, of course. Ain’t gotta ask or nothing.”

“I’d hate to come between you and the—the—” Hawkeye pauses, lifts the patty to his nose. “What _is_ this? Is it a hamburger? I thought they said it was a hamburger.”

Radar shovels another bite into his mouth. “It’s ground meat, sure,” he offers. “Think probably some ham in there, if the convoys made it in time.”

“Radar, this smells like—” Hawkeye pauses and considers the wad of ‘meat’. “It smells like the bottom of Trapper’s foot locker. After it rains, when he needs to wash his socks.”

“Oh yuck, Hawkeye. Don’t’cha know some of us guys need to keep up our strength? Talking like that ain’t gonna change what it is, y’know?” 

“Sure, but—” he stops, considering. Eau de damp, sock-infused foot locker is better than some other things, probably. It’s not—

It’s not the metallic tang of blood, or the rank-sweet smell of damaged bowels, or the fetid stink of infection, or any of the other flavors of war and battle he’s come to know so well. Trapper’s foot smell can’t be specific to Korea, right?—it’s probably something his wife has been dealing with for her entire marriage to the oaf. 

It feels like a shock of cold water to the dangling nerve of his senses. Of course there’s a world beyond this stupid, useless war and of course it smells like Trapper’s feet. 

“But what, Hawkeye?” Radar asks finally, finished with his stack of patties. “You gonna eat that?” 

He considers the tray, with the sad puck of meat and the creamed vegetables and the potato paste. The foot smell sits in his nose like some disgusting vintage, sour and rotten and new. He pushes the tray away. 

“Nah. I think I’ve lost my appetite. Think I’ll save myself for when the right hamburger comes along.” He offers a lecherous wink that makes Radar blush, and then pushes away from the table. 

He wonders what else is out there in the world right now. 

::

It becomes a routine. He gets his tray, finds a seat, and begins trying to remember and forget, simultaneously. He sniffs his food an item at a time and waits for it to evoke _something_ in him that isn’t guts or gore or blood or bile. 

Trapper joins him sometimes, offering even more outlandish summaries of what he smells. Usually they compete to see who can provide the most disgusting description, who gives up on even attempting to eat, but there are times when it feels more like a duty to point out that the gravy smells like the mud under a pig’s slop trough on a hot August afternoon. 

It’s—holy, maybe. 

It’s probably the stupidest, most infantile game played by two grown men with goddamned medical degrees in the world, but who the fuck even cares? Trapper gets it. They’re in the middle of a goddamned war and everyone else can deal with some immaturity when there are actual children murdering one another just up the road. 

::

It has been eight months. Twelve lives. He dreams in monochrome red and has forgotten what coffee should actually taste like. 

Trapper sits next to him in the mess tent and claims the liver today smells like roadkill—a possum, specifically—rolled up in the carpet from a cigar shop. 

Hawkeye lifts his fork to his nose and breathes in. 

::

After Trapper—once BJ’s settled in—

Here’s the thing about serving in the military: by nature of the goddamned job, you get used to losing people. It gets to be second nature that the moment you feel even an iota of familiarity, it has to be ripped away from you because war is loss. War is destruction. War is death by inches, or by miles, or by galaxies. 

So being torn up about missing Trapper is a lesson in uselessness. Hawkeye knows better. He knows he shouldn’t allow himself to _feel_ any of this because he should have expected it from day one. 

So BJ is—

Well, fine. BJ’s fun; a good surgeon and a better friend—but none of that is why Hawkeye won’t let himself explain how he goes to every meal eager to put a name to the horrificness of what they’re being asked to eat. 

He can tell it annoys BJ. He can tell BJ doesn’t understand the ceremony of it. But he can’t— 

Hawkeye tells himself it's because he needs to know—to _know_ —that there is a world outside the wildernesses of Korea. And, yeah, that world might produce an odor foul enough to match the scent of the Army’s chicken a la king, but goddamn it if that isn’t worth it. 

Sometimes he thinks about asking BJ if his coffee ever...if it tastes like…

But he can’t, so he doesn’t. 

::

“I swear to God,” BJ says after they’ve found seats in the mess tent and Hawkeye has picked up his spoon. “If you ask me what any of _that_ smells like, I’ll tie knots in your shorts.”

Radar glances up from down the table. “Gee, you still doing that, Hawkeye?”

“What else am I supposed to do with it? Eat it?” He lets the spoonful of creamed corn splat onto his tray. “You’d have to catch me first.”

“Oh, come off it,” Potter says. “Consider the fact you get to eat your victuals under an actual roof! Time was a soldier’d eat what he was given out and there’d be hell to pay if he didn’t like those apples.”

Hawkeye sighs, stirring at the corn—which absolutely smells like a burned tire covered in olive oil—and relents. “What I wouldn’t give for an _apple_ , though. Fresh off the tree—crisp, and sweet, and it’d—there’s always that sense of space when you get a good one, y’know? The wind in the branches, and the looming threat of frost in the air? And it’s somehow just captured in the skin, in the—in the _flesh_ of a really good apple.”

“Now there’s a thing we can agree on, Pierce. Apples in October. Picked on horseback. And blue, blue skies for miles.”

Radar sighs. “Oh yeah, and then Ma makes jars and jars of applesauce, and apple cider, and apple pie—I sure could go for one of those pies now, hot outta the oven and all speckled over with spices and whatnot. Hoo, boy.”

There’s a pause as everyone swallows, imagining, dreaming, wishing.

BJ drops his chin onto his hand. “Oh, but consider: Oranges. Round and ripe and growing in your own backyard. And when you peel one—it smells like _sunshine_ , like bright mornings and ocean breezes. And then your chin gets all sticky from the juice, and your fingers smell like citrus for days.”

“Sounds messy,” Hawkeye offers to the table at large. “And delicious. Sign me up.”

::

A year. Twenty-two lives. The 4077 has a 97% survival rate; Hawkeye can tell you the names of each of those twenty-two lives he didn’t fight hard enough for. Maybe it’s a blessing that he can’t remember how many he hasn’t lost.

BJ takes to adding more and more sugar to his coffee, but he doesn’t say anything. 

He doesn’t say anything, either, when Peg sends another box of brownies, of fudge, of cake—but he always shares.

It’s hard not to wonder if BJ tastes ash, blood, dirt and gunpowder when he eats them, like everything else in the camp. Is that how they were sent, or how they arrive? How they arrive, or how they’re consumed? Is there a threshold they crossed that made them that way?

Hawkeye doesn’t know the answer and he knows if he asks BJ, Beej would go all stoney and silent and somber. So he doesn’t ask; he steals another square of fudge and holds it to his nose and breaths in. 

It smells—it smells like rich, luxurious chocolate prepared in a silver pot and dotted with cream; like a house filled with the sounds of baking; like laughter and hope and love. 

::

Fifteen months; thirty-seven lives. Their little world keeps on spinning; keeps on taking in casualties and spitting out more men and boys and civilians to go off and die. 

The blood never changes. The food never changes. The coffee never changes. Nothing ever changes.

“Do you know,” he starts one evening, holding up a forkful of what are allegedly noodles. “This stroganoff smells like spring.”

“Spring?” Charles says, clearly incredulous. “How can a thing smell of _spring_?”

Potter looks up from his own plate. “Why, that’s probably the nicest thing I’ve ever heard you say about the food over here.”

BJ shakes his head. “Don’t trust it. He’s going to ruin it in a moment.”

Klinger pauses behind them with his tray. “It’s a Hawkeye tradition: how quickly can he remind us all that we’re eating stuff that barely counts as edible?”

“Spring?” Charles repeats.

“You know when the snow’s melting? And everything is kind of...soupy? All the rotting leaves from the autumn before, and the mud, and the old dead things from the winter are all mixing together? And it’s just kind of damp and moldy smelling? _That’s_ what this smells like.”

Charles recoils, looking disgusted, while Klinger laughs and moves further down the tent. BJ shakes his head and returns to picking at his meal, while Potter glares. 

“That’s absolutely revolting,” Charles says with great emphasis. “How disgusting.”

“If you can’t say anything nice, Pierce, I’d suggest you shut it.”

“Can you say anything nice about it?” Hawkeye asks, pushing away his tray. He considers his coffee cup before pushing that away, too. 

Potter shakes his head. “It’s _warm_ , and it ain’t fighting to go down. All good things, in my book.”

Father Mulcahy steps up at that moment, tray held consideringly in his hands. “Did I miss the odorous proclamations tonight?” 

“Yep,” BJ says, holding up a forkful of the stroganoff. “Perfect timing, Father. Please, join us.”

Hawkeye stands and takes a bow. “Sounds like my work here is done. If you need me, I’ll be en route to Crabapple Cove by way of my liver. Good night.”

::

Almost two years and fifty-one lives later, Hawkeye has forgotten so many things. He’s forgotten normal, everyday things, things that once felt integral to who he is. 

The scent of lilacs in the spring, soft and sweet. The sight of a sunrise over the Atlantic, bursting over the waves like an old friend. The flavor of a Sunday roast, guarded closely and carefully all day until it’s so tender it’s nearly obscene. 

“When you—when you get back, what’s the first thing you’re going to eat?” he asks BJ (and indirectly, Charles) one afternoon when the sun’s high and hot. “Like, the _very_ first thing you’re going to go out and get. Not a meal, not a—not anything like that.”

BJ looks up from his darning his socks, expression slightly devious. “Seems like some things should remain between a man and his wife, Hawk,” he says, waggling his eyebrows. “A man shouldn’t kiss and tell, y’know.”

Hawkeye flings a boot in BJ’s direction. “I’m talking _food_ , Casanova. Get your filthy mustache out of the filthy gutter.”

“A tomato,” he says finally. “A fresh, ripe tomato. Hopefully right off the vine.”

“I think blueberries. Or maybe lobster, a Maine lobster. Doused in butter. Just drowning in it. And actual gin, maybe. And a Cobb salad, on the side.”

“It sounds as if you’re hungry, Pierce,” Charles offers from his side of the tent. He hasn’t looked up from his book, but he’s smirking. “Perhaps you should visit the mess tent and, ah, keep your comments to yourself for once?”

“What about you, Charles?” BJ asks. “What’s the first thing you’re going to look for?”

Charles scoffs and adjusts his book. “Oh, ho, ho. No, I’ll be wined and dined the moment I’m allowed to leave _this_ particular situation. Tokyo, San Francisco, Boston—I will want for nothing. I will have it all and it will all be legions above anything I’ve had here.”

“Aw, come on, Chuck: you know that’s not how we’re playing the game,” Hawkeye admonishes. “Just tell us.”

For a moment, it doesn’t look like he’s going to answer. But then he closes his book and glances over his shoulder towards the rest of camp, a wistful sort of look on his face. “I think—” he pauses. “Rhubarb. With just a sprinkle of caster sugar, but rhubarb nonetheless.”

Hawkeye and BJ say nothing; they wait. 

“Our—our gardener always kept up a small kitchen plot for the house staff, and for the children, for Honoria and myself. And every year there would be rhubarb tarts in the summer for tea. But Chef—Chef would always set aside a few uncooked stalks, for me. It was—it was our little secret,” he finishes, letting out a long breath. 

BJ hmms, lounging back across his cot. Hawkeye stares up at the canvas ceiling and tries to remember the sharp bitter-tang taste of rhubarb. 

::

“Do you know what this smells like?” Hawkeye asks BJ days or weeks or months later while they’re sitting in the mess tent after another one or ten or twenty rounds in OR. It’s just them; Charles has gone straight to bed, and Potter is finishing paperwork with Margaret and Klinger.

“I don’t know, and I don’t _want_ to know,” BJ answers. He takes a bite and his whole face convulses. “This is hard enough to eat without your two-bit commentary.”

“It smells like the beach, after a hurricane’s gone through. When it’s all churned up and littered with fish and debris and the sand’s been turned over? That’s what this smells like.”

“Hawk. Keep it to yourself.”

“But then it also smells a little bit like someone took some cheese and wrapped it in your socks and fed it to a camel and then kept it for six months in a box in the attic.”

“Hawkeye! I’m begging you to shut the hell up.”

The mess tent falls silent.

::

The “police action”—the _war_ , it’s a goddamned _war_ —has been going on for over two years now, and Hawkeye has failed seventy-four lives. Seventy-four people who’ve lost everything because a bunch of idiots with big guns decided to squabble. It feels like it will go on forever and the list of the dead will never end, just keep unfurling until the dusk of humanity.

The coffee is metallic, bitter, bloody, but it’s hot and almost familiar and he curls his whole body around the mug as if it will do anything to stay this chill, this fear, this rage.

“Hawk?” It’s BJ, sounding tired and raw. “What’re you doing in here?” 

“You ever wonder what it’ll be like, if we get to go back? If all of this—” He gestures out at the camp, at the jeeps and the waiting ambulance and the tents and the rushing soldiers. “—if all of this will fit? It’s so much, Beej. It’s—there’s a hundred different Benjamin Franklin Pierces all crammed up inside me and I don’t know if I’ll be able to fit anything else—civilian life. Normal life. Practicing proper medicine and not this meatball shit. Going to the movies. Going where I want.”

BJ busies himself with pouring himself a cup of coffee and takes his time adding in sugar. The slant of his shoulders feels defeated. “I don’t—I think it’s different, for me. Like all of this—” He waves his spoon in the direction Hawkeye had gestured. “—all of this emptied me out. I worry I’ll go—go back to Mill Valley and I won’t have anything left. Cause I lost it all here. Cause it was taken from me here.”

“It’s terrible, isn’t it? Terrible.” Hawkeye takes another sip of coffee; feels it burn like acid and cling in the back of his throat. He wonders if this is it: if the blood and the idiocy and the coffee will plague him until the day he dies. And it’s— 

It’s too goddamned much, is what it is.

“You know what else is terrible? Beej? This fucking coffee. It’s the worst. Almost as soon as I got here I realized that I hate it. I hate it. But there’s nothing I can do about it, y’know? Just like—just like all of this.” He gestures again, weaker and smaller. 

BJ frowns down at his cup, examining the contents like they’re going to offer a fix for it all. When he lifts his head, his expression is soft and still. “Sure it’s bad, Hawk. But it’s temporary. It’s all temporary. It’s not going to last forever.”

“Sometimes,” Hawkeye says after a moment, voice low, “Sometimes I think it just might. And that’s the most terrible thing of all.”

::

The war ends. The fighting doesn’t. The dying doesn’t. But the war—on paper, at least—that’s over 

And here’s what Hawkeye discovers, three weeks and three days after his discharge: 

The coffee hasn’t changed, but he has. He has.


End file.
